Link Love

August 6, 2016 — nicoleandmaggie

How to vote in every state by the vlogbrothers. Note: Some of these may be out of date by November because of pending lawsuits. So check the comments for what to look for and the official links to see what’s happened!

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11 Responses to “Link Love”

My opinion on voting (blue) in a red state has always been that our votes don’t count *as much* (due to gerrymandering), but they still count *some*. It’s nice to read that they may enough count *enough* for once. (And heh, my mom is one of the “college-educated white women in the suburbs of … Dallas.” And she talks to my dad.)

The dental floss issue is weird. You’d expect someone to have done decent studies. Well, I’m going with the anecdotal evidence that even after I brush my teeth for two minutes, gook still comes out when I floss. So, I’m still flossing.

Since I’d refuse to be in the negative control group for flossing (nor can I fathom a way to blind it!), I can’t exactly criticize the fact they’ve never done that study. I do think, as a rule, dental research is utterly inadequate considering the importance of teeth. It also bothers me immensely that dental insurance doesn’t work more like medical insurance.
That said, if they are getting *conflicting* data when they try to study flossing (which could have resulted in a study or two hitting the file drawer), it’s always possible flossing is good to *prevent* gum disease and problematic once you *already have it*- there’s a lot of friction there and small damage done to the tissue might be harmfully contributing to inflammation. There was some large amount of controversy on the benefits of fiber in prevention of colon cancer that are kind of analogous (10 second version: Eat fiber. Unless you’ve already got polyps, and then it might irritate your bowel. Then don’t.).

Why would you want dental insurance to be more like medical insurance? My dental insurance is better than my medical insurance. It covers all preventative care and about 80% (or is it 85%?) of restorative care. My medical insurance covers only one preventative care medical appointment a year, not the two of dental and has a large deductible.

Our dental insurance is Delta Dental, which claims to be America’s largest dental benefits provider, so I did not think that what we had was unusual. Perhaps UC is doing a better job of negotiating benefits than I thought (the medical benefits keep getting worse and more expensive).